Here’s How to Make McDonald’s Special Sauce at Home

Follow these easy steps to make McDonald’s special sauce and create your own delicious Big Mac in your own kitchen.

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One of the best parts about going to McDonald’s is getting the creamy, sweet and sour sauce on a Big Mac burger. Despite what many people think, the recipe actually isn’t a secret. You can buy the ingredients to make McDonald’s special sauce at home from your local grocery store. These are the other secrets McDonald’s employees aren’t telling you either.

There are lots of variations of the recipe out there, but McDonald’s Executive Chef, Dan Coudreaut, suggests the simple recipe below. This burger topping can easily be whipped up in less than five minutes.

Ingredients

½ cup of mayonnaise

4 teaspoons sweet pickle relish

2 tablespoons yellow mustard

1 teaspoon white wine vinegar

1 tablespoon garlic powder

1 tablespoon onion powder

1 tablespoon paprika

Directions

Whisk all of the ingredients in a bowl.

Let the sauce sit in the refrigerator for a few hours if you want the flavors to mix together more.

If you bite into your burger and find that your taste buds aren’t as satisfied as when you pick up a Big Mac in the drive-through window, it’s because this recipe is a simplified version of the one that McDonald’s uses in their stores. The Big Mac sauce they make has over 25 ingredients! If you want to make their fries at home too, this is the secret ingredient behind their addictive flavor.

The recipe above is a much better option if you don’t want to spend three hours browsing the grocery store aisles for all of the ingredients and then another two in the kitchen measuring and mixing them together. Also, as an added bonus, the one Chef Coudreaut recommends is a little healthier too. Now that you know the ingredients that go into McDonald’s special sauce, check out these other facts you never knew about the Big Mac.

Morgan is the Assistant Digital Managing Editor at Reader’s Digest. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2016 where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. When she’s not writing for rd.com or keeping the 650+ pieces of content our team produces every month organized, she likes watching HGTV, going on Target runs, and searching through Instagram to find new corgi accounts to follow.